HIST 209: A History of the World in the Twentieth Century: I (Rev. A3) Report a Broken Link
Welcome to History 209—A History of the World in the Twentieth Century: I, a three-credit, first year introduction to twentieth century world history. The primary objective of this course is to introduce you to the major economic, political, social, scientific, and technological developments in twentieth century history. The course is based on four broad themes: global interrelatedness; identity and difference; rise of the mass society; and technology versus nature, which serve as a guide to understanding the material in each new unit of the course. Much of the material in the course—especially the video segment—is heavily weighted toward an American perspective. While this is perhaps understandable in light of role the United States has played in the twentieth century, it has meant that some areas of the world have been neglected. Canada is one of those areas. The Study Guide that accompanies this course provides some Canadian content and suggestions for further study of Canada in the twentieth century.
This course is a multimedia approach to the study of the twentieth century. The required course materials are this study guide and the textbook, Carter Vaughn Findley and John Alexander Murray Rothney, Twentieth-Century World. The course is accompanied by 14, one-hour programs which you can borrow from Athabasca University Library. There is also some useful supplementary material on the internet, or World Wide Web, notably, at the PBS website (www.pbs.org). Supplementary Materials are items selected by the course authors and/or course coordinator to enhance your understanding of the course content. You are not required to use these resources. You may wish to use the skills you are developing in the course to locate your own supplementary materials.
Although the text book and study guide provide most of the factual information and interpretive analysis, the video programs bring a sense of immediacy and realism often absent from print-based material. Of particular interest in the videos are the many interviews with individuals who lived through the major events and who provide first-hand accounts. What is especially interesting about some of these accounts is how “ordinary people” viewed their role in history.
This Student Manual tells you about the content, structure, and objectives of History 209, the course materials, the number of weeks of study suggested for each unit, the number of examinations and assignments you must do to complete the course, and the tutor and library support available to all Athabasca University students. It also contains the course assignments. Please read the Student Manual carefully and familiarize yourself with its contents before you begin to work on any other course materials.
Note: These course materials have been designed for students who are taking the individualized-study version of this course. Students who are in the grouped-study environment should follow the course outline, study schedule, and learning activities provided by their instructor.
Good luck with your studies!
Unit 1: 1900-Age of Hope
Unit 2: 1914-Killing Fields
| Required Readings |
| PBS Series: People's Century Website |
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Carter Vaughn Findley and Jon Alexander Murray Rothney. Twentieth Century World. Chapter 2, Origins of the New Century, and Chapter 3, World War I: The Turning Point of European Ascendancy.
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| Supplementary Readings |
| Kaiser David E. “Germany and the Origins of World War I” Journal of Modern History, 55 (1983). No.3: 442-474. |
| Gillette, Aaron (2006). “Why Did They Fight the Great War? A Multi-Level Class Analysis of the Causes of the First World War.” History Teacher; Nov2006, Vol. 40 Issue 1, p45-58, 14p |
| Eksteins, Modris (1989). Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys. |
| Hayes, Carlton Joseph Huntley (1963). A Generation of Materialism, 1871- 1900. New York; London: Harper & Row. |
| Annenberg Foundation, Briging the World History, unit 20. Imperial Designs |
| Allenberg Foundation, The Western Tradition, 47. The First World War and the Rise of Fascism |
Unit 3: 1917-Red Flag
| Required Readings |
| PBS Series: People's Century Website |
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Carter Vaughn Findley and Jon Alexander Murray Rothney. Twentieth Century World. Chapter 4, Restructuring the Social and Political Order: The Bolshevik Revolution in World Perspective.
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| Supplementary Readings |
| Pipes, Richard. Did the Russian Revolution have to happen? American Scholar Spring94, Vol. 63 Issue 2, p215, 24p Focuses on the Russian Revolution of 1917 and ponders whether or not it was inevitable. Assertion that, before the revolution, the Russian Empire was a fragile artificial structure held together by mechanical links provided by the bureaucracy, police and army; The isolation of Russian peasants; Why Russia's industrial workers were potentially destabilizing; The relationship of Leninism to Stalinism. |
| Meneejeh Moradian and David Whitehouse Gandhi and the Politics of Nonviolence. International Socialist Review Issue 14, October-November 2000 |
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Tsou, Tang. Interpreting the Revolution in China. Modern China; Apr2000, Vol. 26 Issue 2, p205, 34p
Presents a theoretical interpretation of the Chinese Revolution. Examination of a structuralist effort; the Chinese revolution; Paramount importance of political and cultural change; Assertions on the basis of the Chinese experience. |
| Schram, Stuart Reynolds (1967). Mao Tse-tung. Harmondsworth: Penguin. |
| Annenberg Foundation Bridging the World History. Unit 21. Colonial Identities |
Unit 4: 1919-Lost Peace
| Required Readings |
| PBS Series: People's Century Website |
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Carter Vaughn Findley and Jon Alexander Murray Rothney. Twentieth Century World. Chapter 3: World War I: The Turning Point of European Ascendancy.
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| Supplementary Readings |
| Lu, Catherine. “Reflection and Reappraisal Justice and Moral Regeneration: Lessons from the Treaty of Versailles” International Studies Review V.4 (Fall 2002), pp. 3-25. The Treaty of Versailles, which concluded World War I, aimed to establish a “peace of justice”; sadly, it only seemed to pave the way to a second, more devastating world war. What lessons about justice and reconciliation can we learn from the treaty and its apparent failure? Some scholars argue that the fault of the treaty lay in its preoccupation with retributive justice, undermining prospects for reconciliation. Rather than positing justice and reconciliation as inherently conflictual moral values or goals, both need to be conceived as part of the project of moral regeneration. Such a multidimensional project requires a certain kind of justice and reconciliation, founded on mutual respect for the humanity and equality of others. An assessment of the relationship among truth, justice, and reconciliation in the framework of moral regeneration indicates that the most grievous moral fault of the Treaty of Versailles lay in its process, which facilitated neither a truthful accounting of the war's causes and consequences, nor the affirmation of moral truths by victors or vanquished. The lack of an authoritative and public moral accounting of the Great War undermined both justice and reconciliation in international society. |
| Bottom, William P. “Keynes' Attack on the Versailles Treaty: An Early Investigation of the Consequences of Bounded Rationality, Framing, and Cognitive Illusions”. International Negotiation; 2003, Vol. 8 Issue 2, p367-402. The Paris Peace Conference was arguably the most complex negotiation ever undertaken. The principal product of the conference, the Treaty of Versailles, failed to accomplish any of its framers' major goals. Relations between the Allies themselves and the Allies and their defeated enemies seriously deteriorated as a consequence of the negotiations and attempts to implement the treaty. Economic conditions in Germany, the rest of Europe, and eventually the United States declined as well. At the time of the Treaty's publication, John Maynard Keynes and a considerable number of other participants predicted these events, pointing to the negotiators' errors and oversights as a primary cause. The logic of Keynes' argument is re-examined in light of recent research on the psychology of human information processing, judgment and choice. It reveals that his approach is actually very consistent with and anticipates both Simon's conception of bounded rationality and recent work on cognitive heuristics and illusions. Negotiator bias has been studied almost exclusively using simple laboratory settings. The catastrophic lose-lose nature of the Versailles Treaty illustrates the way in which complexity necessitates reliance on simplifying heuristics while propagating and amplifying the impact of the bias that is generated. Evidence from the treaty negotiations and the failed implementation of the treaty suggest some very significant boundary conditions for the application of rational choice models in the business, politics, and international relations contexts. It also demonstrates the need for negotiations researchers to focus more attention on the implementation of agreements and the long-term effects of those agreements on relationships. |
| Greene, Theodore P. Ed. (1957). Wilson at Versailles. Boston: D.C. Heath. |
| Veatch, Richard (2003). Canada and the League of Nations. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Books on Demand. |
| Annenberg Foundation, Bridging the World History. Unit 22. Global War and Peace |
Unit 5: 1926-On the Line
Unit 6: 1927-Great Escape
Unit 7: 1929-Breadline
Unit 8: 1930-Sporting Fever
Unit 9: 1933-Master Race
| Required Readings |
| PBS Series: People's Century Website |
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Carter Vaughn Findley and Jon Alexander Murray Rothney. Twentieth Century World. Chapter 6, "restructuring the Social and Political Order: Fascism;" & Chapter 10, "World War II: The Final Crisis of European Global Dominance".
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| Supplementary Readings |
| William W. Hagen, “Before the ‘Final Solution’: toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland.” The Journal of Modern History v. 68 (June 1996). |
| Bullock, Alan (1962). Hitler: a study in tyranny. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books. |
| Calvocoressi, Peter, Guy Wint and John Pritchard (1989). Total War: The Causes and Courses of the Second World War. New York: Penguin. |
| Kershaw, Ian (1985). The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. London: E. Arnold. |
Unit 10: 1939-Total War
| Required Readings |
| PBS Series: People's Century Website |
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Carter Vaughn Findley and Jon Alexander Murray Rothney. Twentieth Century World. Chapter 10, World War II: The Final Crisis of European Global Dominance, and Chapter 9, Asian Struggles for Independance and Development.
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| Supplementary Readings |
| Bratzel, John F., and Leslie B. Rout, Jr. “Pearl Harbor, Microdots, and J. Edgar Hoover.” American Historical Review (December 1982), pp. 1342-1351. |
| Dear I.C.B. General Editor; Foot M.R.D Consultant Editor (2001). The Oxford Companion to World War II. Oxford: Oxford University Press. |
| Pierson, Ruth Roach (1986). "They're Still Women After All”: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. |
| Honda, Katsuichi; Edited by Frank Gibney; Translated by Karen Sandness Nankin E No Michi. English The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan's National Shame. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe. |
| Annenberg Foundation. the Western Tradition. 48. The Second World War |
Unit 11: 1945-Brave New World
| Required Readings |
| PBS Series: People's Century Website |
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Carter Vaughn Findley and Jon Alexander Murray Rothney. Twentieth Century World. Chapter 11, From the Cold War to the Global Marketplace: International Relations Since 1945.
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| Supplementary Readings |
| Haslam, Jonathan. “The Cold War as History.” Annual Review of Political Science; 2003, Vol. 6 Issue 1, p77-98, 22p The fall of Soviet Communism led to the release of top secret documents vital to our understanding of the Cold War. This material is, however, available to research only to a limited extent. The best access is to be obtained in the archives of the Warsaw Pact countries, including those in Berlin. In Moscow itself, secrecy still forestalls access to the most important documents, above all those relating to the origins of the Cold War under Stalin. It is therefore not surprising that the debate about Cold War origins is still with us, and without any notable improvement in the quality of evidence adduced in the debate. It is by no means clear, as historians such as Gaddis have asserted, that the origins can be laid merely at the door of one unreasonable and unreasoning man: Stalin. It is, however, equally unconvincing to hear from Trachtenberg that Stalin was merely doing what all statesmen do and did so entirely rationally. The complementary argument from Leffler that, given the rational nature of Russian decisions, the answer lies more with U.S. than with Russian policy makers begs as many questions as it seeks to answer. The wary reader is well advised that the jury is still out until both the prosecution and the defense actually have adequate access to the evidence. |
| Starobin, Joseph R. “Origins of the Cold War: The Communist Dimension”. Foreign Affairs; July 69, Vol. 47 Issue 4, p681-696. This article examines the origin of the cold war. The origins of the cold war lie deeper, however, than any analysis of Russia's own interest. Nor can they be understood only in terms of an attempt to prevent economic recovery and political stability in Western Europe. The cold war's origins must be found in a dimension larger than the requirements of Soviet internal mobilization or the thrust of its foreign policy. They lie in the attempt to overcome the incipient diversity within a system of states and parties, among whom the changes produced by the war had outmoded earlier ideological and political premises. The conditions for the transformation of a monolithic movement had matured and ripened. The sources of the cold war lie in communism's unsuccessful attempt to adjust to this reality, followed by its own abortion of this attempt. For Stalin the cold war was a vast tug-of-war with the West, whereby not only internal objectives could be realized but the international movement subordinated. Its constituent parts went along on the assumption that in doing so, they would survive and prosper. The price of the Stalinist course was to be fearsome indeed. Thus, the cold war arose from the failure of a movement to master its inner difficulties and choose its |
| Ichiyo, Muto. “The Cold War and Post-Cold War Dynamics of Taiwan and East Asia in People's Security Perspective.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies; Apr2002, Vol. 3 Issue 1, p25-37. This paper was originally written as a keynote speech for a specific occasion, an international forum that was held by the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT) in Taipei in February 2001, to discuss Taiwan's international status in the post-Cold War era. The PCT is known as a strong advocate of Taiwan independence and democratization, and I had this specific audience in mind in organizing this paper. My concern was that the independence advocacy that had aptly expressed people's aspirations in the democratization movement under the iron-fist rule of KMT was being subsumed, as Taiwan polity was Taiwanized and democratized, into a banal statist discourse. This discourse, I am afraid, has distanced itself from its original popular source and become the elite politicians' discourse, indifferent to the everyday life and security of the people in Taiwan. I approached this problematic from the perspective of 'people's security', which I discussed in my previous essay on the topic in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 1. As the mutual relationships between East Asian countries had to be shaped overwhelming by the US Cold War rhetoric and material influences, discussing Taiwan with regard to the transition to the post-Cold War era required me to go, albeit in outline, into the basics of these relationships as well as the modes of US hegemony in this region both in the Cold War and post-Cold War settings. I felt that characterization of these diverse elements, if sketchy, was indispensable to discussing the topic, Taiwan today. At my friends' suggestion, I tried to revise the original paper to fit into the concerns of the general readership, with the different aspects mentioned more fully explained. However, I have found this difficult as it would require me to write a completely new article, or maybe a whole book. So I present this paper almost as it was written for the original PCT audience. |
| Melvyn P. Leffler and David S. Painter Eds. (2002). Origins of the Cold War: An International History. London; New York: Routledge. |
| MacDonald, Callum A. (1987). Korea, the War before Vietnam New York: Free Press. |
| Granatstein, J. L. & David Stafford (1990). Spy Wars: Espionage and Canada from Gouzenko to Glasnost. Toronto: Key Porter Books. |
| Annenberg Foundation. the Western Tradition. 49. The Cold War |
Unit 12: 1947-Freedom Now
| Required Readings |
| PBS Series: People's Century Website |
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Carter Vaughn Findley and Jon Alexander Murray Rothney. Twentieth Century World. Chapter 8, Sub-Saharan Africa Under European Sway; Chapter 9, Asian Struggles for Independence and Development; Chapter 15, Sub-Saharan Africa: Decay or Development? and Chapter 17, Asian Resurgence.
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| Supplementary Readings |
| Gendron, Robin S. “Tempered Sympathy: Canada’s Reaction to the Independence Movement in Algeria, 1946-1998.” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 9 (1998): 225-42. |
| Falola, Toyin (1999). The History of Nigeria Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. |
| Beck, Roger B. (2000). The History of South Africa. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. |
| Brown, Judith Margaret (1984). Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. |
| Allenberg Foundation. Bridging the World History. Unit 22. Global War and Peace |
Unit 13: 1948-Boom Time
| Required Readings |
| PBS Series: People's Century Website |
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Carter Vaughn Findley and Jon Alexander Murray Rothney. Twentieth Century World. Chapter 12, Toward Postindustrial Society: The United States and Western Europe in the Postwar Decades.
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| Supplementary Readings |
| Marangos, John. “Developing a Civilized Society in Transition Economies: The Post Keynesian Paradigm” Journal of Socio-Economics; Aug2006, Vol. 35 Issue 4, p660-681. A Post Keynesian paradigm of transition requires the exposition of what I define as primary elements: economic analysis; definition of a good society; speed; political structure; ideological structure and the role of initial conditions. The next step is to identify secondary elements, the desired changes with respect to: price liberalisation-stabilisation; privatisation; institutional structure; monetary policy and the financial system; fiscal policy; international trade and social policy. It is argued that Post Keynesianism clarifies the reasons why the orthodox model of transition implemented in transition economies was inappropriate and unsuccessful. The Post Keynesian recommendations would have resulted in a more sensible and successful transition. |
| Clarke, Peter. “Keynes and Keynesianism” Political Quarterly; Jul-Sep98, Vol. 69 Issue 3, p297-305. Focuses on the reputation of John Maynard Keynes, who remains the most influential economist of the twentieth century. Reference to his four major claims to importance; Rejection of a Keynesian approach to economic problems; Reason Keynes' reputation remains controversial; three charges against `the historical Keynes.' |
| Melvin W. Reder. “Chicago Economics: Permanence and Change” Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Mar., 1982), pp. 1-38. |
| Barnet, Richard J. (1983). The Alliance--America, Europe, Japan: Makers of the Postwar World. New York: Simon and Schuster. |
| Edsall, Thomas Byrne (1984). The New Politics of Inequality. New York: W.W. Norton. |
| Annenberg Foundation, A Biography of America #23 The Fifties |
Unit 14: 1945--Fallout
Unit 15
| Required Readings/ Assignments |
| Essay Assignments |
| History of the World in the Twentieth Century: I Reading File |
| Yayama Taro, Junko and Tom Roehl Newspapers Conduct a Mad Rhapsody over the Textbook Issue Reading 3, Assignment 2, topic A |